A to Z Challenge Day 4: Duke vs Destro

Today we luck out with two of the mainest characters.

Duke was sort of the original leader of GI JOE.  In the first couple miniseries he was the head honcho despite that he was supposed to be only a sergeant, not an officer.  Somehow Duke ended up being captured and forced into an arena in both miniseries, once to fight Snake Eyes and another time some big dude.  It's sort of implied he and Scarlett have a thing, though they can't really show them hooking up or anything.

But in the first full season of the Sunbow series Duke was around a lot less and mostly replaced as the commander by Flint, who was then replaced in the second season by General Hawk.  That's the cycle of life for characters based on toys who aren't as popular as Optimus Prime or Megatron.  He was voiced by Michael Bell who was Prowl (and other characters) on the Transformers show and Lance on Voltron and in other stuff too.

Yo Joe!

In the movie, Duke saves his younger half-brother Lt. Falcon by taking a snake missile to the chest.  But he just goes into a coma, from which he wakes and then mostly disappears. Watching it recently you can tell Duke was meant to die originally.  After getting the snake in the chest he has a parting "Yo Joe!" and then goes unconscious.  Scarlet says, "He's gone...into a coma."  How the hell could she know that?  She's not even a doctor.  It's kind of hard to say someone's gone into a coma after like 5 seconds.  At the end of the movie Doc calls General Hawk and tells him Duke pulled out of the coma without even showing him.  If he was meant to live wouldn't there have been a reunion between Duke and his half-brother Falcon at the end? 

Hey, baby, check out my cannon.

In the first season of the DIC series the original Duke was only a background character but in the second season a new look Duke was back as a field commander.  Kind of funny how he can ride his missile launcher.

In the 2009 movie Duke was played by Channing Tatum, who was an ordinary soldier who survives a COBRA attack and is recruited by GI JOE along with his buddy Ripcord.  But then he was killed off early in the second movie, which is probably for the best.

Destro was also in the 2009 movie and played by Christopher Eccelston, the fifth(?) Dr. Who and first of the rebooted series.  Like COBRA Commander he doesn't get his iconic iron mask until the end thanks to some nanobots or something.  He wasn't in the second movie except for one early scene where COBRA Commander leaves him behind in prison.

Destro isn't formally the second-in-command of COBRA but he is pretty much the second alpha dog.  He wears an iron mask that according to the cartoon is because an ancestor was disgraced and jailed, so his heirs wear a metal mask until law and order is destroyed.  Makes sense!  The comic probably uses a similar BS reason.

Destro mostly supplies COBRA with weapons and cool gizmos like the MASS device and Weather Dominator through a company called MARS.  And it's strongly implied that he and the Baroness are a thing.  It'snot  until the first full season of the cartoon that they mention he's Scottish, though maybe the comic does it sooner.  In the cartoon he sounds more Caribbean than Scottish but whatever.

The first version of the toy has a silver mask.  Later he gets his own squad called Iron Grenadiers and they change his mask to gold and he gets a half-cape thing.  Sweet.  The silver mask was used in the Sunbow series and movie and the gold mask in the first season DIC series.  They were both in the comics at the different periods.

Check out that cape!  Sexy.  In the second season of the DIC series, Destro is back to the silver mask.

Kind of funny that his face is silver but his neck is flesh-colored.

This Comic Book Resources article has some other facts, many taken from the comics I haven't read.